Skip Navigation
Santabot @slrpnk.net πŸ‡¦πŸ‡Ίπ•„π•¦π•Ÿπ•₯π•–π••π•”π•£π• π•”π••π•šπ•π•– @lemm.ee

Here's why I don't think this is a good idea.

  1. It would be extraordinarily easy to bot it and just silence anyone you want.
  2. I agree, moderation is absolutely necessary to maintaine civil discussion, but silencing people, because they have unpopular opinions, is a really bad idea.
  3. I love lemmy because it is the ultimate embodiment of decentralised free speech. This destroys that.
  4. If I were a bad actor, hypothetically, let's just say lammy.ml or haxbear and I decided I wanted to silence anyone who disagrees with what I have to say. Then I could just make a fork of this project to only value my instances votes and censor anyone who doesn't agree with what my community thinks.
  5. This tool simply acts as a force multiplier for those who want to use censorship as a tool for mass silencing of descent.

Yes, I've read the Q&A, But I can simply think of more ways to abuse this bot for bad than it can be used for good.

10
10 comments

  • First off, no rules in a centralized system can survive corrupt admins/moderators. At best, the rules can make it difficult for the admins/mods to hide their malfeisance. If we don't assume good faith from the admins, this discussion is pointless because we should just leave this instance.

    Second, upvotes and downvotes already moderate discussion. The default comment sorting algorithm prioritizes upvoted comments and hides downvoted comments, and people do tend to treat downvoted comments negatively. Popularity already matters, it's just a matter to what extent each thread gets you a fresh start.

    1. Right now, slrpnk account generation is gatekept by the mods. You have to pass a Turing test to be let in. This makes it difficult to amass a sufficient army of bots without mod assistance. It's worth looking out for, but not expected by any means.

    2. Agreement and dislike are different things. Empirically, people can become more hardened in their opinions if they see crappy disagreement - that's why organizations like FOX NEWS show a constant cavalcade of liberals and leftists being stupid. As long as people upvote well-formulated disagreement, this could actually improve discussion because it filters out the comments that would never have convinced anyone anyway. That's a big "as long as", so it's worth seeing in practice whether or not it holds.

    3. Lemmy instances have admins and moderators with absolute unaccountable power over bannings. It has never been decentralized or pro-free speech in the ways santabot might have destroyed in a more fundamentally anarchic social media. If you want to make use of Lemmy's decentralization, make your own instance and see who wants to let you crosspost. If you want more, make your own social media platform that is (more) fully decentralized.

    4. Yes. Bad actors gonna act bad. Stay away from places that give them authority.

    5. Not very well. You're leaving it up to the whims of the voting public. It would be easier to write a bot that asks ChatGPT whether a user holds certain opinions and ban them if it says yes. Or deputize more (informal) mods to ban people based on their personal opinion.

    It is natural that an object can be used for bad in more ways than it can be used for good. 'Good' is a fragile concept, while 'bad' is everything else. A kitchen knife can be used for bad more easily and in more different ways than it can be used for good. So can a brick or a water bottle. The question is whether its use here pumps towards good, both now and in the future.

    I understand expecting this experiment to go poorly, but I think it's excessive to say the experiment should not be run at all.

    • I think that's the key, votes moderate comments and posts in terms of sorting. They don't moderate it in terms of outright silencing an opinion or idea.

      1. I'm assuming that the voting is based on all accounts across all instances, so it's not just your instance whose account creation rules matter, it's all instances across the Fediverse, right?
      2. I think ultimately people vote based on preconceived biases more than they will on the validity of an argument or its facts. I'd definitely love to see some data on how the experiment plays out. It'd be quite interesting if we could get that in full.
      3. I guess not necessarily free speech but more marketplace of ideas. I guess my main concern here is that it will get implemented across the Fediverse without Admins and moderators thinking about the long-term effects of such a system.
      4. I prefer instances that have a more open policy in terms of defederation. I feel this tool could provide people who are willing to go to the lengths of vote manipulation, direct moderation capabilities without having to be a moderator in the community itself. Hence, I believe this would lead to instances with more open federation policies being more susceptible to manipulation by extremists.
      5. Sure, but by the misuse of this tool I can affect the moderation of an individual on a community that I don't have any moderation powers in.

      I definitely think it's an interesting experiment that's worth running. But I'm hesitant to see what the outcomes of it will be if it gains mass adoption.

        1. It would be extraordinarily easy to bot it and just silence anyone you want.

        You can try. Make a bunch of accounts on one of those instances that doesn't police their signups very well, downvote everything I've ever done with all of those accounts, and see if I get banned. I think it's more difficult to accomplish this than you think.

        1. I agree, moderation is absolutely necessary to maintaine civil discussion, but silencing people, because they have unpopular opinions, is a really bad idea.
        2. I love lemmy because it is the ultimate embodiment of decentralised free speech. This destroys that.
        3. If I were a bad actor, hypothetically, let’s just say lammy.ml or haxbear and I decided I wanted to silence anyone who disagrees with what I have to say. Then I could just make a fork of this project to only value my instances votes and censor anyone who doesn’t agree with what my community thinks.
        4. This tool simply acts as a force multiplier for those who want to use censorship as a tool for mass silencing of descent.

        You posted that everyone in the US should need a nationally verified ID in order to make a social media account, and got dozens of downvotes. You also have some other unpopular opinions. You said Google should be shut down. You're not banned or close to it. Why are you so sure that this tool is going to ban people for expressing unpopular opinions?

        I get where you're coming from. It's a valid concern. I think an important part of the answer will be opening up the process, and maybe even taking it out of my hands as the sole proprietor of all the parameters, so it's a community project instead of my project only.

        I posted more about this:

        https://slrpnk.net/post/13361827

        1. I’m assuming that the voting is based on all accounts across all instances, so it’s not just your instance whose account creation rules matter, it’s all instances across the Fediverse, right?

        Right.

        1. I think ultimately people vote based on preconceived biases more than they will on the validity of an argument or its facts.

        Sometimes. Not enough to overshadow other positive participation, in most cases. There's a thing that does happen often, where the bulk of what someone says is their unpopular opinion, and they present it with a lot of hostility, so they spend most of their time collecting mostly downvotes. That will get you banned. That, I think, is a feature, not a bug.

        I’d definitely love to see some data on how the experiment plays out. It’d be quite interesting if we could get that in full.

        It's a big invasion of everyone's privacy for me to lay out all the data in full. Do you want me to break down its judgements about your user, so you can see some details of at least one case? I can do that, either here or over a DM.

        I'd like to be able to lay out a more complete picture, too, if you have ideas for how I can break it down without creating drama.

        1. I guess not necessarily free speech but more marketplace of ideas. I guess my main concern here is that it will get implemented across the Fediverse without Admins and moderators thinking about the long-term effects of such a system.

        This is completely fair. What I talked about in https://slrpnk.net/post/13361827, spreading the operation of the tool out to the community instead of me operating it only, seems like it could be a good solution.

        1. I prefer instances that have a more open policy in terms of defederation. I feel this tool could provide people who are willing to go to the lengths of vote manipulation, direct moderation capabilities without having to be a moderator in the community itself. Hence, I believe this would lead to instances with more open federation policies being more susceptible to manipulation by extremists.
        2. Sure, but by the misuse of this tool I can affect the moderation of an individual on a community that I don’t have any moderation powers in.

        Like I say, try it. It's not impossible to do, but I would be surprised if anyone could make this work in reality without creating dummy accounts on an industrial scale.

        An approach that will work better is to post content that will attract a lot of upvotes, raise your own user's rank, and then downvote everything I've ever done from that single highly-ranked user. You can try that, as an alternative or in conjunction, and see how well it works, if you want to try.

        I definitely think it’s an interesting experiment that’s worth running. But I’m hesitant to see what the outcomes of it will be if it gains mass adoption.

        It's definitely not a silver bullet. I have a tendency to look at the whole thing with rose-colored glasses, when it's not perfect. I'm completely open to people poking holes in it or figuring out things that I've missed. All I would ask is that it be based in how it actually behaves, not just a theory about how it's going to do all these terrible things, that's not based on observing how it works in practice.

        Then if we look together at what it actually does, and you find a problem, we can agree on it and I can potentially even fix it.

10 comments